Where does the Money Go?
by Christopher Gutteridge
After many battles with excel, pivot tables and the IBM “Many Eyes”s site, I’ve had a go at visualising our Payments Dataset. I’m now an armchair auditor!
Please note that I am far an expert in working with such data so the below graphs should not be considered “official” data from the university as I may have made mistakes in my processing. The data is not entirely complete as it contains no payments to individuals, and nothing commercially sensitive.
Here’s who we’ve paid money to in that dataset… I had to trim the data down to payments of £10K+ as otherwise it seemed to crash their java!
This shows a break down of the broad categories and sub categories of what we paid money for.
I hope that we’ve got some budding statisticians, accountants or data visualisers who can do something better than me!
One cool idea; find out what payees we have in common with the local hospitals and council:
- Spend over £25,000 in Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust
- Payments to suppliers with a value over £500 from Southampton City Council
- Spend over £25,000 in Southampton City PCT
Categories: Datasets and Visualisation. Tags: payments.
So who are Ebsco then? And what do they do that is worth 1 1/3 Million pounds?!?
The next logical step is to start connecting the URIs of these companies up with some external data so we can start to answer questions like that!
There are certainly some very weird things in that data, Chris. E.ON have a very large (i.e. greater than £1M) positive payment one month and a very large (> 1M) negative one too. I have no idea if that’s normal.
Chris, excellent representation, can I talk to you about our student profile?
Debra
Sure, but I bet we’ve got some people who are experts at this stuff somewhere in the University. I’ve mailed Sue Lewis a S3RI to see if she’s got any suggestions of who might be good at visualising data.